The Trouble with Genocide*

In a city that doesn't want for them, I think the NYPL Live series is one of New York's great resources (Paul Holdengraber* notwithstanding; although undoubtedly I unfairly discredit his contribution on account of my allergy to his attitude. About which I am nevertheless willing to modify my impressions, see below). Sadly, I find myself too often unable to attend events, usually because of my travel schedule. That said, I hadn't realized how much I'd missed until I heard that tonight's Robert Silvers Lecture with Nicholas Kristof was the final NYPL Live event of the season. The talk was preceded by a screening of excerpts from the recent event with Norman Mailer-- evidently his last public appearance. I really hadn't paid a lot of attention to him after 'The White Negro' which I read when I was reading everything about race and can't actually recall the essay but guess I didn't think it that important. Mailer didn't really figure for me; not my period, not my paradigm. But he was keen and unsparing in this final video which will send me back to the text. If I were a writer, that's the kind of legacy I'd want.

Anyway that was a preamble, delirious and bracing: Felix the Cat to the main event.

Nicholas Kristof's presentation was surprisingly unpolished and correspondingly effective. I hope that doesn't sound cynical, a quality I do not attribute to his performance. In large part, it was his coverage that introduced and engaged me and so many many others to and with the situation in Darfur. His courage in pursuing the story and the personal commitment were both evident and evidently sincere tonight.

But so too was a hopeless humanism. Clearly, Mr. Kristof is moved and motivated by the pathos of the individual. I think I remember now that
he bought a sex slave in SE Asia at one point in order to free her from bondage? There's no question that the stories he told (and the pictures he showed) are outrageous, and no question that the conditions obtaining in Darfur are unacceptable, that pressure from the international community is necessary and right.

I have to give credit to Mr. Holdengraber* for demonstrating an unaccustomed restraint in his role this evening, as well as for carefully synthesizing what he said were over 100 comments submitted in writing during the talk (written submissions are a wise programming decision, I think) into a few relevant questions. Apparently a number of people wanted NK to justify his argument that the crisis in Darfur merited priority attention from the international community (and individuals in the audience) over against say malaria, or the Congo where the deadliest war in recorded history supposedly ended in 2003.

The gist of Kristof's response was that genocide-- defined as a state policy of extermination of a race, ethnicity or other characteristic believed to be heritable or otherwise essential-- is the greatest challenge to our humanity and therefore automatically belongs at the top of the agenda of those who would pursue peace and justice for the peoples of the world.

A post-Enlightenment subject would find it difficult to reject this argument out of hand. Indeed, I confess that there were points during his presentation when I reached for my handkerchief. (I'm cutting back on kleenex). But I also find it incredibly uncomfortable. Leaving aside everything else, it reflects a quaintly modernist and decidedly 'western' conception of how power is organized and effected much less of the role of the state in its engagement and exercise. There's the whole ISA thing which I think is very important, and beyond that something I'm just beginning to glimpse from my recent exposure to part of the middle east, about which I don't feel sufficiently well versed, instructed, or experienced to comment beyond saying that I begin to realize, to my horror, that the Enlightenment project (within which I have understood my entire life) was likely always more idiosyncratic than I was aware, and even more minor tomorrow than today.

*with apologies to Walter Michaels.

Access denied

The first time I skimmed the post introducing this resource (see and click above), I gathered it was mainly a map of areas where Facebook and other sites that encourage kids to commodify themselves were not available. While I do take my first amendment rights seriously, I have little use for 'social networking'. Adults should not require formal mechanisms to facilitate social relationships, which are by their very nature arise out of one's existing relationships or by happenstance; in this I acknowledge a kernel of romanticism, but friendship is gossamer and specific, and doesn't answer to an ad.

Yesterday, however, I tried to go to the Daily Star, which I do most days. Somehow my computer has captured some regional US paper that is also called Daily Star and it fills in this address when I try to type it in the bar at the top of the page. So I googled daily star, and the first result is the correct one, but Google prohibits access to the site! I find this incredible and of course I do realize that social networking sites play a different role in places where there is no first amendment, and where rights of assembly, free speech and a free press either don't exist or are otherwise more fragile than they are in the US today, at least for the time being. See Naomi Wolf, The End of America (or, as the Guardian puts it:) 'Fascist America in 10 Easy Steps'.

Disarming

This is an update to my post 'the Chrysanthemum and the Tulip'. More yet to come on the question of the proper role of anthropology in the military and the military in anthropology as the meeting of the American Anthropological Association (28 Nov-2 Dec) proceeds. The Chronicle article is maddeningly bland and 'even-handed', but it taken in parts it does offer some priceless gems. To wit:

Felix Moos, a 78-year-old professor of anthropology at Kansas who has trained several human-terrain participants, passionately supports the program. He has roughly a dozen different ways of saying "A better-educated military will kill fewer people, not more."

I expect I confess my naivete when I reveal that my overall impression had been that an unarmed civilian population has had better success with this objective.

'A dozen different ways of saying "a better-educated military will kill fewer people, not more"'. Any striking writers willing to take a guess? Not directly a propos, but I found some cynical alternative army slogans posted in 2001 on a site called 'Free Republic.com: A conservative news forum' that also deserve the broader audience we here at Punctum et Studium are proud to boast. Point being that if self-identified conservatives and (as it appears from the comments) members of the military are as clear sighted and unsentimental about their purpose and deployment as this-- then Moos and other apologists for the 'human terrain' initiative have even more--a great deal more-- for which to answer:

1. "Kill All That You Can Kill"
2. "Shower With Men"
3. "Knock Up Foreign Broads"
4. "All The Grits You Can Eat"
5. "Be A Flame Thrower, Not A Flame Broiler"
6. "Purple Hearts = Free Beers At Hooters"
7. "Whimsical And Human, Just Like M*A*S*H"
8. "Cubicles Are For Wusses"
9. "Napalm Means Serious BBQ"
10. "Over 1,000,000 Sheared, Beaten, And Worked Into A Sub-Human Fury!"
11. "Totally Beefcake and Proud of It"
12. "Beat Up Sailors"
13. "We Won't Screw Your Mind Up As Bad As The Marines Will"
14. "Kicking Nazi Tail Since 1942"
15. "Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Accessorize"
16. "Risk Your Life for Freedoms No One Appreciates!"
17. "Play Doom For Real"
18. "Sure Beats Lurnin'!"
19. "Because Terminators Are Real"
20. "Forget Nation-Building -- Let's Destroy One!"

Giving Thanks (a gesture to the bird)

It would be banal to say that I hate the holidays, but truly I don't understand the fuss. If you like turkey, eat it. If you like eating it en masse, do it (but please try to keep the volume down). If you like shopping at Walmart at midnight, well, I really don't know where to begin. But why bottle up all this enthusiasm for one day out of the year--and go public in the process? I have always considered turkeys like roller coasters: something I encounter so seldom that I can always convince myself to try it again just to see if I haven't acquired a taste (and lost the impulse to throw up after). I am sorry to say that on each occasion-and here I concede to the Thanksgiving spirit by foregoing my ever tenuous restraint: I hate both. This year I had a decent meal at Savoy, peconic bays with porcini followed by quite a nice venison. But it bothers me that restaurants must trot out (please ignore the execrable pun) prix fixe menus and special seatings and compel a different sort of engagement from patrons, and basically function as surrogate families. The whole point of going out is to avoid subjugation to that condign institution. It also bothered me that my friends were tarted up for a 2:30 pm dinner as if they were going out to a nightclub. The point is to be as discreet as possible about this embarrassment of a nationally sanctioned group activity, isn't it?

One of my best Christmases was one I spent a few years ago at Palm Springs with a friend. I was living in LA at the time and confit'd spiny tail lobster and terrine'd fois gras and candied nuts for the three weeks prior and bought a case of rose champagne and we drove it all out to Casa Cody (I love Casa Cody but their cats are vicious) with the dog and sat around the pool eating and drinking and plucking the occasional lime or orange from the trees above. Next day we went to a spa for massages and scrubs and swims and had a flat tire but even that didn't dampen spirits. But sure as flooding follows a storm, I'll be on to Christmas soon so this is just to demonstrate that I'm not ideological about my disfavor and can just as readily enjoy the day called Thanksgiving or Christmas or whatever just as I can readily enjoy any other day off so long as I am compelled neither to profess nor respond in kind to sentiment.

But getting back to my complaint about Thanksgiving: on the more spiritual side of things (and after all, whom are we thanking?) I have to say that if you aren't grateful for food and shelter and mobility and a job or whatever assets you have on the other days of the year, I don't see how you are going to manufacture it on Thanksgiving nor why you should bother. Either you are grateful or you're not. If you think you should be more grateful than you are, then you should deal with that but surely it's a personal matter or something to take up with your therapist or priest or closest and most tolerant friends. But honestly, there's a reason why new year's resolutions (oh and we'll get to that day, too) are a joke. Nobody transforms over night, even on 31 December.

Anyway, I suppose I am entitled to a properly puritan sense of self satisfaction along with my thanksgiving satiety this year on at least 2 accounts: 1) a friend (who shall be nameless, not least because I fear this person may encounter this blog and recognize this person's self in the description) contributed to the Farm Animal Sanctuary in the name of my pet and 2) I didn't order the turkey option for my dinner thereby registering my disapproval of this year's turkey slaughter. If it's absolution enough for the president, well, by George, that's good enough for me.

Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay

might stop a hole to keep the wind away.

I first saw The Wooster Group perform The Emperor Jones-- Kate Valk and Willem Dafoe at the Performance Garage. I was about to say around 1998, but just looked it up and it was 1993. That means I was just a couple years into my academic career, and can only be relieved that I didn't take the occasion to write something about blackface about which I would now be embarrassed. I could digress further in a few directions but suffice to say that I retained the memory and wanted to make it back to other things (I have to one or two but which?) including the revival at St Ann's last year which I'm really sorry to have missed. Is it possible that it's been 14 years? Hamlet was electric, and I don't agree with Ben Brantley that it was all about the mimesis. Every element of the performance from staging to acting to design was obliged to report on every element of the text and performance (via Gielgud via Shakespeare and via however many other interventions) from staging to acting to design, and the result was why we huddled masses stick it out in New York. That said, I have to confess that he's on to something with 'hypnotic to narcotic', but I attended last Friday at the end of a long week and long day and my sympathy extends of capacity not of judgment.

One Plane, One Vote

I heard today from some one who knows that (topping the news reports) the Dubai Air Show saw $130 billion in sales--in 2 days. This included $35 billion in sales to Qatar alone, which, as this person observed, would provide sufficient aircraft to put the entire Qatari population in flight a la fois. There is so much that is so grotesque about that but I will limit myself to the observation that it does tend to bring one back to reality with respect to the limitations on the possible impact of individual decisions on the overall future of the planet, or of anything that takes place upon it. I liked the little garbage game I wrote about in the previous entry ('Gotham Garbage'), and I don't intend to withdraw it as I make no claims about what I'm doing with this blog, but I do feel the need to acknowledge, with some distaste, the relative whimsy of this and so much else that I think and do and write.

I started out so much more aware of the futility of liberal politics, and somehow have backslided as I have aged. I didn't bother voting in the first election for which I was eligible. Not because of apathy, mind; but out of a conviction that party politics in the US was essentially an alibi--and not a benign one-- for not engaging in the more demanding work required to build a more just society. While I don't think I ever stopped believing that, I did get to a point where my activism had declined to the point where my (well grounded!) theoretical radicalism had become my excuse for failing to behave as a political actor at all.

Today I vote. On the whole I guess I think it is better to have the right and exercise it than otherwise, even if it is still largely coke vs pepsi. I don't despise the marginal comfort I take from the idea that, while I may ever be haunted by the Mondale presidency that might have been, I am blameless (in an electoral sense) for the depredations of Mr. Bush.

This is a ways from Dubai. Whimsy.

Gotham Garbage

Living in New York, I can only shop for as much food and other supplies as my two hands can carry in, yes, plastic bags (loaded down, paper tears sooner). If I'm not travelling, I usually make it to two farmers' markets per week, where I buy most of my food. But sometimes this doesn't happen or it does but I don't plan well enough and get home late or just tired, usually lazy, and decide to order in. Like other New Yorkers, I consider the luxury of a wide variety of delivery options at all hours to be an entitlement. I can't buy much in advance (how will I transport it? where will I put it?) but if it's 10 pm and I want a whole roasted branzino or salt and pepper lotus root or pastrami on rye with a pickle, I can have any one or all of these on my plate within the hour, with no more effort than it takes to pick up the phone or click on a web site.

Each time I take the easy way out, I'm left with mountains of garbage--or recycling, as I prefer to think of it. Not that that should make me feel much better. The sheer volume of plastic containers--often containers within containers-- is pretty staggering. I'm trying to cut back.

I guess I'm still going to have to do better. Check it out:

I played The Gotham Gazette Garbage Game and sent 2,014,352 tons of refuse across 793,937 miles.

Smile

I wouldn't have paid so much attention to this if I hadn't received an evaluation the week before in which my actual performance was acknowledged as benefiting the organization and but I was threatened with imminent termination on account of anonymous and unspecified complaints of my 'condescending' and 'contemptuous' attitude toward various employees. I'm not ready to lay out a brief here. But in my follow up interview my supervisor, a semi-closeted gay white man who is preparing for retirement within the year, actually volunteered that he 'suspected that gender was at issue' in the reaction I have incurred--and which he credited in his assessment (left in writing on my chair as he left the office for the weekend). Mind, my (women) colleagues with whom I shared the evaluation have called it 'insane'.

I was a feminist before I got out of braces. No flabby Friedan for me, nor Robin Morgan; I toted and quoted Shulamith Firestone throughout my early teens. I was deeply impressed by her unsentimental take on motherhood: 'giving birth is like shitting a pumpkin'. I've never been pregnant. I don't have a family. Could this be a reason? Just now I returned to look up the reference. The pages are yellow and the binding cracks as I open The Womens' Press paperback (with the iron logo). I'm too old even to wince any more at the marginalia; I'm almost ready for compassion--even admiration-- for me, nearly 30 years ago.

What did I know at 14, to underline: 'The smile is the child/woman equivalent of the shuffle; it indicates acquiescence of the victim to her own oppression'? or to find a boyfriend whom I could persuade to read the book, whose own comments (for example, in response to a passage in a section entitled 'The Racial Family: Oedipus/Electra, the Eternal Triangle, the Brothel-behind-the scenes', reading 'What the white woman doesn't know is that the black woman, not under the thumb of one man, can now be squashed by all. There is no alternative for either of them than the choice between being public or private property [my original underscore!], but because each still believes that the other is getting away with something, both can be fooled into mischanneling their frustration on to each other, rather than on to the real enemy, "The Man"' --) would read, in still pink ink: 'NOT GOOD'?

(To be fair: this same boyfriend was even then amassing an arrest record and FBI file that will ever put me to shame).

I'd thought this was all part of the detritus of my adolescence. That first world feminism belonged in classrooms, as a useful set of historical references that might help tomorrow's Goldman analysts better appreciate their opportunities, and maybe think twice about the life-work issues they, their colleagues, hires or (more theoretically) supervisors might face as women (who are still weirdly defined primarily by virtue of their reproductive function).

'Feminism is the inevitable female response to the development of a technology capable of freeing women from the tyranny of their sexual-reproductive roles--both the fundamental biological condition itself, and the sexual class system build upon, and reinforcing, this biological condition'.

Thus sprach Shulamith in The Dialectic of Sex, back in 1970. I picked it up nearly 15 years later, and after an initial conversion, left it on the shelf for a long time. There's a lot to leave behind (specifically, its repudiation of class in favor of gender as the fundamental basis of social order and struggle) but there's a lot more with which I find a renewed sympathy and inspiration as I brush the crumbs of dried binding glue from my lap.

Mother Earth

I attended an update on the millennium development goals at the UN today and learned that 80 per cent of sub Saharan Africa's small farmers are women. They walk an average of 4 miles a day to get their water, and they produce 90 per cent of the continent's food (elsewhere I've seen reports at 75- 80 per cent. Regardless: a preponderance). But for a variety of reasons, including the fact that (and this may be garbled; at the very least an overgeneralization; but I couldn't stay long enough to clarify during the q&a) they are not considered farmers socially (qua gender, as I understood it), they have the least access to technical and other information to help them improve their methods and lives. Only 17 per cent of the arable land in the region is under cultivation. Almost half of the population of the region lives on less than $1 per day.

(None of this is really surprising, of course. But I am reminded of how much is really at stake in an internationalist feminism: something I've always believed in and at times fought for--but if you live in a wealthy nation and don't commonly find yourself in the academic or activist situations that would tend to remind you--well, it does tend to become an abstraction. Even modest activities such as today's are salutary under such circumstances).

These statistics were offered as part of a presentation on progress toward millennium development goal #1: 'Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger'. The chart that accompanies this update in The Millennium Development Goals Report shows that since 1999, progress (even if slight) has been made toward this goal in every region except for Western Asia, where poverty rates have more than doubled since 1990. The narrative report doesn't comment on this. I can think of a few possible reasons. Check this out, too.